I wanted to highlight this before we go further into "what should my raid do" land, but this is all very subjective and doesn't add a lot to to the discussion. Raids are unique, figure out your own buff situation. And heaven forbid you have to do a little math along the way (Hint: logs are useful, if your raid isn't full of the perfect players that simcraft simulates).

I still don't understand why it lists Demon Soul (Imp) as well. Does this mean you start of with a Fel gaurd, switch to succubus, and then switch to Imp for the second Demon Soul?

The whole pet swaping idea seems like a dps increase, but only once at the start of the fight like someone already noted. The biggest annoyance with this concept is when you do it during combat you lose Soul Link and have you recast it. I don't know if it's a bug or not, cause if you do it out of combat you still have it after you swap pets, but it sure is frustrating.

Typo. Was meant to be succubus.

If you were to do any pet swapping I believe starting with felguard and switching to Succubus after Demon Soul/Fel Storm would be the way to go about it.

Blood Fury seems to give 585 spell power, not 173.

While calculating your "new average SP boost" do you take into account that you do NOT have the perfect uptime on your activated buffs (the one you would have if you just use them on cooldown), because you will have to wait for metamorphosis to come off cooldown (It could be the other way around, and meta will come off cd so much earlier, that you will not have the full duration of meta coincide with your cooldowns). For new uptime you would probably want to edit the priority list in simcraft to only use your bloodfury, jewelry trinket and whatever else only while in metamorphosis.

PS. 104 effective haste is still "less" than 80 int, so even with that herbalism is nowhere near "top profession".

I find that often, Meta is up at the 2 minute mark if your using Shadow Bolt or incenerate as your fillers.
However if its not, your right you are losing some effectiveness of your on use items, but thats difficult to quantify.

What your really talking about here is the cooldown doesn't refresh in time. If meta refreshes at 15 seconds before your cooldowns do, your golden, because you have glyphed meta, and none of the use CDS last longer than 20seconds. Its extremely rare that I see meta refresh at 30 seconds before the 2 minute CDS, but when it does happen, I suspect its still better to wait 15 to use the CDS together.

The discussions on this subject that I have read have said that you should wait and use the CDs when the meta is available if its going to be up in a reasonable amount of time to when your CDS are on. Like around 15 seconds. but if its going to be longer you should just pop your cooldowns when they refresh. We really digress on this though, I think this debate about the optimal Meta use is still ongoing...

More to your point, after the 2 minute mark, your only getting the 10% damage boost from demon soul if your unlucky. Accounting for what your saying, you'd get 30% from the first two minutes, 20% in a 4 minute fight, and 16.66% added benefit in a 6 minute fight (averaged percent increases). That would be minimum values, assuming your completely unlucky with the Meta refresh RNG, but for me its rare that they're only up together at the beginning. Usually they will hit together at least twice in a 6 minute fight. The numbers I posted are Ideal numbers, numbers for a fight where you have meta up every 2 minutes. It doesnt change the statement that we still have more effect from on use items, it just means that the longer the fight, the less additional effect we get.

Don't forget though, my numbers leave out mastery, so our actual percentages are going to be higher.

Just to clarify, I think the OP should be updated to say engineering is the 2nd best profession for warlocks because we get more effect out of its on-use int boost. And herbalism's numbers could be updated, to show its more effective for us, your right its not best, but its not just a straight +80 haste for us either. I never stated that either should be considered our top profession. Tailoring is clearly the best at the moment, by a clear margin.

P.S. The engineering tinker is on a 1 minute CD, meaning if your completely unlucky on meta reductions from sb or incinerate, those two cds would still be together.

I got a question regarding pet swapping in combat.

As the demon soul effect from the Felguard is a bigger benefit than the one from the Succubus we tend to start the fight with Felpup out, popping meta, cd's and demon soul and soulburn out the Succubus.

My question now is:
Is it worth to start the fight with the Felguard's Felstorm and after that switch to the Succi? Because as far as I observed, in-combat pet switching makes you loose your Soullink, which results in recasting it. So you sacrifice one GCD for Felstorm.

The alternative is to pop meta and demon soul and soulburn the Succubus before combat starts. You would loose Felstorm but gain one GCD.

So what's the most ideal way of switching from Felpup to Succubus (assuming you want the Felguards demon soul)? In-combat or pre-combat? Does the use of Felstorm compensate the loss for one GCD?

Would you mind clarifying what trinket you are describing that is JC only, especially one that is heroic ilevelled. Could you link to the object and perhaps the pattern from which it is obtained? As a demo lock only using the Gems, yet doing heroic content I would be very interested in getting it.

He meant Figurine - Jeweled Serpent - Item - World of Warcraft
It's not ilvl 372 but it surpasses most of the available trinkets except Darkmoon Card: Volcano - Item - World of Warcraft

Source: http://elitistjerks.com/f80/t110222-...n_4_0_6_4_1_a/

While this probably is true, sometimes speccing out of Demo is not an option. (for example I raid 10-man lately and our setup doesn't include an elemental shaman or even a mage) So min-maxing your Demo output in most fights is a valid discussion, even with the dualspec option =)

It was answered by Nokwar already, just to clarify, by "372 BiS" I mean "Best in Slot with all of the gear available, including 372 iLvl pieces". If you are a Jewelcrafter there is practically no reason why you'd want to skip figurine, except maybe some dire need of hit.

Swapping felguard precombat equals at the very least 3 seconds lost on the demon soul uptime, probably more. It feels much better for me to let him spin, while I get max uptime of the buff I actually bothered to summon him for.

But that's pure feeling. The math is easy though, if "2 gcds (of fillers probably, since both casting succubus and sould link comes at around the time you are done with DoTing, HoGing and SFing anyway) > 3-5 seconds of Demon soul buff + Felstorm - ~7 seconds of succubus' dps" holds, then you should swap them before fight, otherwise just stick to the felguard and his storm.